Search results for 'tag:Direct objects tag:Numbers' matching tags 'Direct objects' and 'Numbers'

Re: carry on

Avangi — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:32:30 GMT

The definition I have in mind is similar to number 2, but may be colloquial. As applied to a love afair, A would be said to be carrying on with B. That is, my usage would be intransitive, while the usage in number 2 is transitive, a love affair being the direct object.

Etheredge is planning to fight the criminals, not negotiate with them. The interpretation you originally suggested sounds like he's saying, "If the criminals are given a voice, we may as well all give up."

I'll admit you could make a case for "We can't go on like this. Criminals must be eliminated."

I'm leaning toward, "The world cannot allow criminals to participate in the business of government."

- A.

Re: grammatical exercises

Anonymous — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:47:00 GMT

on number two of noun clauses, where you put ???, it is a direct object, and, on number three of noun clauses, the clause is Whoever invented Boston baked beans, and it's a direct object.

Re: Transformational Rules and Subject-Verb Agreement

miriam — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:01:07 GMT

In response to the questions posed in the first post of this thread, "the officer" is NOT the subject of the sentence regardless of whether the sentence is active or passive. "The officer" is undoubtedly the doer of the action in both sentences, but it is the subject only in the sentence with the active verb.

In the sentence with the passive verb, it can only appear in the predicate as "agent". It is still the doer of the action but no longer the subject of the sentence.

The subject, in a sentence with a monotransitive verb such as "capture" is always the "receiver" or "undergoer" of the action, and it will change from subject to direct object in an active sentence.

If we have a look at the post before mine, we will see "The officer has been captured by the subjects", which is untrue if we consider the sentences in the first post correct. The subjects have been captured, not the officer.

"The subjects" is not only the grammatical or formal subject of the passive verb, it is also the notional subject or whatever other name you might wish to call it. The subject of a sentence is not necessarily the doer of the action, and that fact doesn't make the subject in question any less "logical" than it should be. Actually, it'd be illogical to make "the officer" the subject of the passive verb if what you mean is precisely the opposite.

The officer, whether as agent or subject (from a syntactic point of view) will always be the "agent" of both sentences, the active and the passive, from a different perspective, from that of thematic roles. Perhaps analysing the sentence in terms of thematic roles will help you see the diferences between active and passive constructions more clearly. In this type of analysis, the agent (not a syntactic function) is the doer of the action regardless of whether the sentence is active or passive and also regardless of the position the construction occupies in the sentence. The direct object of an active sentence, and the subject of that sentence in the passive voice, are called "patient" if a living entity, and "theme" if it's a non-living entity. Again in this case, it shows that places are not always what define a function.

Leaving that aside and coming back to transformational grammar, Chomsky and his theories aren't the easiest to understand. But it is important to remember that an active sentence and a passive one require different mental processes and that, according to Chomsky, when you think of a sentence there are choices you must make before actually coming up with an utterance. One of those choices has to do with the sentence being active or passive. If you decide on a passive sentence, that will dictate a number of sub-processes needed in order to make adjustments to produce a grammatical sentence. Chomsky says that the choices concerning a sentence in the passive voice are made at the very beginning, at the moment you decide your sentence will be in the passive voice instead of the active. All this usually happens without us being aware of our own mental processes, but it seems we make decisions such as subject-verb agreement the very moment we decide what type of sentence we wish to produce. In his first book (Syntactic Structures, 1957, Chomsky made the rules for the passive voice appear as "optional". Later, in 1965, when he was already closer to becoming a rationalist or mentalist, and farther away from structuralism, he saw that the rule couldn't possibly be optional and that they should appear at the level of the phrase structure rules; in other words, before the "transformational" stage.

I hope this makes sense. I tried to put it in very few words, but I'm not sure it was a good idea.

Miriam

Re: About the meaning of "where"

Velimir — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:11:58 GMT

I'll try to give some information on this as a non-professional.This is how it looks like in the serbian language,and I suppose,it is very similar in all other slavic languages and also the latin language.

For indicating a location the locative case of a noun is used.If the english language had similar declension of nouns then the nouns following the prepositions "in" and "at" would be in the locative case.The presence of the preceding preposition is obligatory when the noun is in the locative case.

But,if the verb indicates motion,or in plain english,if you are :
going to, flying to, traveling to..

like in the question given in the opening post,then the noun will be in the dative case.This case you can connect with the nouns following the preposition "to" although the preposition is not necessarily present.The word "dative" derives from latin "dare" which means "to give" and the usage is most obvious on the example of that verb:

I gave my girlfriend a flower.

If you translated this in serbian,"girlfriend" would be in the dative case.Indirect object is in the dative case.The direct object ("a flower") is in the accusative case.

"Cases play a major part in determining a noun's syntactic role in the sentence, so word order is not as important in Latin as it is in other languages, such as English. Because of noun cases, words can often be moved around in a sentence without significantly altering its meaning, though the emphasis will have altered" (from a Wikipedia article on the latin language)
Btw,changing nouns,adjectives,pronouns and numbers to different cases is pretty tough area of the language with more cases,and is often lifelong mistery for many natives,and I know that well.Luckily,english is not a case-sensitive language.

Best regards

Re: direct object indirect object object of a preposition help me! plz

ClarkePeters — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:12:39 GMT

This post is a little dated but since I've been working with my students on this very topic I thought I'd post.

First, you can't understand what the "object of the preposition" is if you don't first know how to identify prepositions. So you need to find a list (google "list prepositions English" or "frequency list prepositions English") and you should get plenty of lists. Depending on which list you go by, there are from 80 to 130 or so prepositions. Most are not used too often, so I'd get a frequency list and try to learn the first 50 or so.   That may sound like a lot of words, but compared to the number of words in Webster's 500,000 word dictionary, that's really very few words--and they are SO IMPORTANT to understanding sentence structure. If you don't want to memorize, no problem, just keep a list with you at all times.

When you come across a word from the list, check to see if it has an object by asking "what" after the preposition.
              John called about the party.
              about what? the party,
              so "party" or "the party" if you include the article, is the object of the preposition.

Be careful, prepositions sometimes act as adverbs.
John got up and went to the kitchen.
up what? ---ummmm, no answer, there is NO object, so "up" is an adverb to "got"

as for DO, ask "what" after the verb.

John made a cake.
John made what? a cake
DO is cake

as for IO, ask "to whom/what?" or "for whom/what?" after the DO
John made Mary a cake.
John made what? a cake
DO is cake
a cake for whom? for Mary
IO is Mary.

The following sentences are exactly the same in meaning! (except maybe in emphasis)

John made Mary a cake.         common usage
John made for Mary a cake.   NOT common usage, but technically
                                                  correct, sometimes used for emphasis
John made a cake for Mary.    common usage

same with "to"
John gave Mary a cake.
John gave to Mary a cake.   NOT common usage
John gave a cake to Mary.

some grammarians will say that an IO can ONLY be between the verb and DO.
Other linguists say functionally there is no difference, so it is OK to say that "to Mary" or "for Mary" is the IO. However, others will argue that they are adverbials answering the question where (to) or why (for) about the verb (made why? for Mary    gave where? to Mary).
How one describes it is not important, as they all function the same.

Re: Preposition placement

Philip — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:35:49 GMT

Spides wrote:
All your sentences could be written with just "all" or "all of." I think that "all" would be designated a pronoun in each of your examples. It can be used as an adjective--She sat up all night--but in your sentences "all" means "the whole number or amount" and is the direct object of the verb "purchased" in all the examples. "Of her gifts" is a prepositional phrase modifying "all." When the prepostion "of" is not actually used in a sentence, it is still understood.

I see "gifts" as the direct object, answering the question of what she bought. The rest is qualifying.

Re: Preposition placement

Spides — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:28:50 GMT

All your sentences could be written with just "all" or "all of." I think that "all" would be designated a pronoun in each of your examples. It can be used as an adjective--She sat up all night--but in your sentences "all" means "the whole number or amount" and is the direct object of the verb "purchased" in all the examples. "Of her gifts" is a prepositional phrase modifying "all." When the prepostion "of" is not actually used in a sentence, it is still understood.

Re: Which way would you sway?

milky — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:11:27 GMT

Do you doubt that was the case?

If so, I guess you disagree with this:

"If they have studied "English Grammar", this is probably an encumbrance which they might well put aside for the present, since it is based on a more or less imitative recapitulation of Classical Latin Grammar, which is totally non-applicable to the English language as it now stands.

Lest this seem an arbitrary statement, let me note that English has no "Cases" of the noun, in fact is survives with nothing at all like the five Latin Cases. The English Verb does not match the six "Tenses" of the Latin verb at all, and the insistence on Person in English verbs, as compared to Latin, is virtually without meaning. The constant iteration of the word "Subjunctive" in English grammars is a weak and misleading term since the inherited subjunctive disappeared from the language centuries ago. "

http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/EngLatGrammar.html

Lowth's method included criticising "false syntax"; his examples of false syntax were culled from Shakespeare, the King James Bible, John Donne, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and other famous writers, raising the question, by what authority did Lowth aspire to judge these writers' syntax? His approach was based largely on Latin grammar, and a number of his judgments were arrived at by applying Latin grammar to English, a misapplication according to critics of a later generation (and his own stated principles; he condemned "forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language"¹). Thus Lowth condemns Addison's sentence "Who should I meet the other night, but my old friend?" on the grounds that the thing acted upon should be in the "Objective Case" (corresponding, as he says earlier, to an oblique case in Latin), rather than taking this example and others as evidence from noted writers that "who" can refer to direct objects.

http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-lowth

Lowth said that even though the use of a preposition to end a sentence was suited to the familiar style of writing, it was much less graceful and perspicuous than placing the preposition before the relative. I'd say there's an implication of inferiority there, wouldn't you?

4. Getting into the nitty-gritty of non-overt arguments

Case Assigner — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 01:25:36 GMT

4) Discuss the problems raised by the paired sentences below:

a) I have eaten a hot meal.

I have eaten.

b) She is smoking cigars.

She is smoking.

c) She is writing a letter to her friends.

She is writing to her friends.

d) She is writing a novel.

She is writing.

e) She drinks a lot of wine.

She drinks.

We can observe in these examples that some verbs allow an argument to be omitted.

When the argument is not represented overtly we still interpret the sentence as

referring to an activity involving two arguments. a) for examples says: I have eaten.

We interpret this one as âI have eaten somethingâ. There is an extended meaning in the second sentences. The first ones are much more specific in meaning.

There is a relatively small class of verbs in English which allow the direct object to be omitted

Discuss the semantic effect of object omission in the sentences below:

f) She is expecting an important visitor.

She is expecting.

g) The teachers kissed the students.

The teachers kissed.

h) The children are washing their dolls.

The children are washing.

i) John and Mary met Jane in the park.

John and Mary met in the park.

Semantic restrictions on the implicit argument cannot be derived in any obvious way from the structure. The meaning is between both sentences is completely different than those given in a â e. Omissibility of an object is kind of arbitrary, it is not predictable. âEatâ for example allows for an understood object while âdevourâ, which is closely similar in meaning, does not.

Louise is eating.

*Louise is devouring.

The same applies to desert and abandon.

Taken from the book: Non-overt subjects are not constrained by the lexical properties of the verbs whose arguments they are. A non-finite verb may have a non-overt subject. This is a productive rule.But implicit objects are constrained.

A lexical rule allows the object of a certain number of transitive verbs in English to be implicit, while syntactic rules require implicit subjects for non-finite sentences.

Re: Begin and start

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 05:12:09 GMT

I think that many times begin and start can be used interchangeably.

But one difference is that when you are turning on a peice of machinery (car, computer), you can say, "I am starting the car." You can't use begin for that.

Also, these is what wordweb says:
begin:
verb: begin (began, begun, beginning)
1) Take the first step or steps in carrying out an action
"We began working at dawn"; "The first tourists began to arrive in Cambodia"; "He began early in the day."
2) Have a beginning, in a temporal, spatial, or evaluative sense
"The DMZ begins right over the hill"; "The second movement begins after the Allegro"
3)Set in motion, cause to start
"The Iraqis began hostilities"; "begin a new chapter in your life"
4) Begin to speak or say
"'Now listen, friends', he began"
5) Be the first item or point, constitute the beginning or start, come first in a series
"The number 'one' begins the sequence"; "A terrible murder begins the novel"; "The convocation ceremony officially begins the semester"
6) Have a beginning, of a temporal event
"WWII began in 1939 when Hitler marched into Poland"; "The company's Asia tour begins next month"
7) Have a beginning characterized in some specified way
"The novel begins with a murder"; "My property begins with the three maple trees"; "Her day begins with a work-out"; "The semester begins with a convocation ceremony"
8) Begin an event that is implied and limited by the nature or inherent function of the direct object
"begin a cigar"
9) Achieve or accomplish in the least degree, usually used in the negative
"This economic measure doesn't even begin to deal with the problem of inflation"; "You cannot even begin to understand the problem we had to deal with during the war"
10) Begin to speak, understand, read, and write a language
"She began Russian at an early age"
Noun: Begin
1) Israeli statesman (born in Russia) who (as prime minister of Israel) negotiated a peace treaty with Anwar Sadat (then the president of Egypt) (1913-1992)

start:
Noun: start
1)The beginning of anything
"it was off to a good start"
2)The time at which something is supposed to begin
"they got an early start"
3)A turn to be a starter (in a game at the beginning)
"he got his start because one of the regular pitchers was in the hospital"
4)A sudden involuntary movement
"he awoke with a start"
5)The act of starting something
6)A line indicating the location of the start of a race or a game
7)A signal to begin (as in a race)
8)Advantage gained by an early start as in a race
"with an hour's start he will be hard to catch"
Verb: start
1)Take the first step or steps in carrying out an action
"Who will start?"
2)Set in motion, cause to start
"The U.S. started a war in the Middle East"
3)leave
4)Have a beginning, in a temporal, spatial, or evaluative sense
"Prices for these homes start at $250,000"
5)Get off the ground
"Who started this company?"; "I start my day with a good breakfast"; "The blood shed started when the partisans launched a surprise attack"
6)Bring into being
"Start a foundation"
7)Get going or set in motion
"We simply could not start the engine"; "start up the computer"
8)Move or jump suddenly, as if in surprise or alarm
9)Begin or set in motion
"I start at eight in the morning"
10)Begin work or acting in a certain capacity, office or job
"start a new job"
11)Play in the starting line-up
12)Have a beginning characterized in some specified way
13)Begin an event that is implied and limited by the nature or inherent function of the direct object
"She started the soup while it was still hot"; "We started physics in 10th grade"

Search results for 'tag:Direct objects tag:Numbers' matching tags 'Direct objects' and 'Numbers'

Re: carry on

Re: grammatical exercises

Re: Transformational Rules and Subject-Verb Agreement

Re: About the meaning of &quot;where&quot;

Re: direct object indirect object object of a preposition help me! plz

Re: Preposition placement

Re: Preposition placement

Re: Which way would you sway?

4. Getting into the nitty-gritty of non-overt arguments

Re: Begin and start

Re: About the meaning of "where"